Meet Our Guest Bloggers: Leslie Stainton & Jen Leija
This week is full of performances and residency events by the British theater group Propeller. We’ve asked two community members, Leslie Stainton and Jen Leija, to cover all the events and report about them here. Our bloggers will have behind-the-scenes access and will bring you recaps and reporting from all of Propeller’s performances and residency activities. We hope you’ll talk to Leslie and Jen over the course of the week. They’ll be following the comment threads on each post, and will be happy to hear from you!
Bringing the University/community perspective is Leslie Stainton. Stainton is the author of Lorca: A Dream of Life (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999) and the forthcoming Ghost Walk: A Theater, A Memoir. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Opera News, and American Theatre, among other publications. Leslie was also a contributor to UMS’s Speaking of Theater series. She edits Findings magazine for the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
Bringing the student perspective is Jen Leija. Jen, in addition to being a fifth year senior at the University of Michigan, is a teacher, writer, and marathon runner. She won the Hopwood Underclassman award in essay writing in 2008 and has continued to write in essay, journal, and speech form ever since. Currently she is student-teaching ninth grade English at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor (hi guys!) while working as a Resident Advisor for U-M housing. She also sings lead in the Pops Jazz Band and is active at St. Mary’s Student Parish. As an artist and writer she has loved Shakespeare since the first raunchy lines of Romeo and Juliet, and everything his work stands for: detail, dirt, and doing incredible things with language in every single line.
